Recently developed object and face recognition techniques include the use of elastic bunch graph matching. The bunch graph recognition technique is highly effective for recognizing faces when the image being analyzed is segmented such that the face portion of the image occupies a substantial portion of the image. However, the elastic bunch graph technique may not reliably detect objects in a large scene where the object of interest occupies only a small fraction of the scene. Moreover, for real-time use of the elastic bunch graph recognition technique, the process of segmenting the image must be computationally efficient or many of the performance advantages of the recognition technique are not obtained.
Accordingly, there exists a significant need for an image processing technique for detecting an object in video images and preparing the video image for further processing by an bunch graph matching process in a computationally efficient manner. The present invention satisfies these needs.